Iowans challenged to end ‘culture of silence’

CEDAR RAPIDS — There’s a certain perception associated with an event that involves 50 people sitting in a church and discussing abortion; however, perceptions aren’t always reality.

Many people in America, according to Dr. Jeannie Ludlow, a professor of English and coordinator of women’s studies at Eastern Illinois University, have forgotten that abortion existed prior to the two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions (Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton) that legalized it.

“There is no shame inherent in abortion and, yet, abortion is one of the most highly stigmatized legal activities in American society,” Ludlow told the group gathered at Christ Episcopal Church Saturday for her lecture on “Challenging a Culture of Silence.”

Artist and activist Heather Ault, an Illinois resident, developed a series of visual narratives about the international history of abortion and contraception, known as "4000 Years for Choice." Click the graphic above to view more of the collection.

“The earliest known written reference to abortion is from 1550 B.C. and is a medical papyrus from Egypt that explains how to do an abortion. … You see, when we talk about the history of abortion in the United States, we tend to want to start at 1973 and the passage of Roe. We lose sight of the fact that there was a whole lot going on in the world long before Roe versus Wade happened.”

Perhaps due in part to this selective memory, Americans have forgotten that abortion was legally practiced, or at least practiced without legal intrusion, in the U.S. for centuries. Even when abortion was initially made illegal (between 1820 and 1867, depending on the state), enforcement of such laws didn’t take place until after World War II.

“After the war, when the men returned from fighting the war, there was an economic need in the nation to get Rosie the Riveter to go back home and be a mom,” Ludlow said.

Doctors who had been openly performing abortions, sometimes for decades and in prominent and well-known offices, began to be jailed following the war when these laws that had been on the books for nearly a century began to be enforced. When these respected doctors were jailed or otherwise stopped providing abortions, that is when the country began to experience what is now known as “back alley” abortions.

“It isn’t that back alley abortion didn’t happen between 1820 and the end of World War II, but up until the end of the war there was at least one reputable abortion provider in major cities,” she said. “But when these reputable doctors became fewer, and not-so-reputable providers were endangering women, the situation prompted the formation of a new activist project in the late 1950s called the Clergy Referral Service.”

Essentially, the Clergy Referral Service was a nationwide telephone tree of clegypersons from all denominations that maintained and distributed a list of the safest, illegal abortionists in the U.S.

“So, if you were pregnant and you went to your minister — yes, your minister or priest or rabbi — that person, if a member of this network, could provide information on the closest provider. And your clergyperson would then place the woman in contact with that provider,” Ludlow said.

“It is truly amazing at the number of clergy who were a part of this, and they did so because they wanted the women in their congregations to be safe.”

The rest of the story, which is the lead-up to the two Supreme Court cases that prohibited states from outlawing abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy, is fairly well known to most. It was within this period, and following the court decisions, that American sentiment began to trend toward the two political extremes that are present in the U.S. today.

“The reason I’m on the road with [this message],” Ludlow told The Iowa Independent prior to her lecture, “is because it is really important. I see this whole political, pro-choice/pro-life fighting and arguing as hurtful to women.”

When a woman enters an abortion clinic today, according to Ludlow, who worked for more than a decade in such a clinic, that woman automatically assumes she will have a bad experience. The woman believes this because on one hand she has those on the pro-life side telling her that she is going to feel badly, that she will think about this baby for the rest of her life and that she’ll suffer from depression. On the other hand, the pro-choice people have told her that an abortion is easy — “no worse than having your wisdom teeth out” — and that she’ll feel nothing but relief.

“Either way, women lose because this political argument as totally dominated what people are learning and thinking about abortion, and none of it really fits with the real experiences of women,” she said.

“Abortion is a loss. It is a loss that most women handle very, very well. But, for some women it is a painful loss. We need to recognize that, acknowledge it and work with them. We need to stop telling women that there is only one way to have an abortion.”

The best thing that society can do to heal itself, according to Ludlow, is to remove the stigma that has been placed on abortion. Women and men, she said, need to start using the word and talking about it.

“I don’t think it is fair to ask current abortion patients to carry the load of telling the stories,” she clarified. “They need to focus on themselves, their families, their lives and their decisions. But I am asking people like myself — people who had abortions years ago and are no longer in the same vulnerable situations to begin those conversations.

“For me, abortion made it possible for me to be where I am today. It made it possible for me to have the job I have and the career I have. I would’ve had to drop out of school if I had a child back at that point in my life. So, it made me a good mom too — and I’m not just saying that, my 25-year-old son has told me so.”

Ludlow acknowledges that not every person is ready to speak openly and to the world about an abortion experience.

“Wouldn’t it be great if women like me could tell their moms or their daughters or their sisters or their best friends or their husband’s sister or whomever?” she asked. “I’m not saying that we all need to go on television and tell our abortion stories, but we need to start speaking to those people in our lives that we love and trust.”

The conversation has to move beyond the rigid stances contained in the pro-choice and pro-life terminology and begin to acknowledge that abortion is about people.

“I think we should stop asking people if they are pro-choice or pro-life. It’s a zero-sum game,” she said. “What if, instead of asking that, our polls asked people, ‘Someone you love, someone in your life is pregnant and consideration an abortion. Could you support her?’ I think that many more people than just those who identify as pro-choice would say that they could support her.”

Although the lecture about abortion fits well with current legislative happenings in Iowa, the event was set in motion nearly a year ago when a local woman heard Ludlow give a similar presentation in Florida. The Cedar Rapids lecture was arranged and hosted by the Abortion Access Project and the Iowa Abortion Access Fund.